"Americans are more conservative than they have been in decades"? WTF?

[alp227]

Washingtonpost.com reports on a new book by a political science professor:

James Stimson knows as much about public opinion as anyone in America. He has been tracking the nation’s policy preferences for more than 20 years using a “policy mood” index derived from responses to a wide variety of opinion surveys involving hundreds of specific policy questions on topics ranging from taxes and spending to environmental regulation to gun control.

The latest update of Stimson’s policy mood series suggests that the American public in 2012 was more conservative than at any point since 1952. (Actually, since mood in each year is estimated with some error, it seems safer to say that the current level of conservatism roughly equals the previous highs recorded in 1980 and 1952.) While the slight increase in conservatism from 2011 to 2012 is too small to be significant, it continues a marked trend that began as soon as Barack Obama moved into the White House.



Stimson ’s book, Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings, provides a detailed description and discussion of his approach. (Stimson tracks liberal policy mood, but I have reversed his index in order to highlight the striking current level of conservatism.) Measuring public opinion by tracking common trends in a wide variety of specific policy questions is a marked improvement over the more usual approach of simply asking people to identify themselves as conservatives or liberals. Many people don’t think in such abstract ideological terms, and even those who do sometimes use the conventional labels in unconventional ways.

Is the methodology flawed here? Or is it natural for a lot of people to be against the current political position of the government?

[Warpy]

1. The methodology is seriously flawed

but conservatives are desperate to assume the mantle of inevitability, even after their policies have all been tried and have all failed miserably. Again.

If you ask people issue by issue, you find out that even self identified conservatives are quite liberal when it comes to policy. They've just adopted conservatism for a whole salad bar of reasons.

[Skidmore]

8. Did you ever wonder what would ensue if all

people with public voices on the left started just to emphatically state that "America is a center left nation"? The Rs have repeated the saw that it is a center right nation until it is an assumed truth without basis. The left is not disciplined enough to coordinate such a massive change of the language that shape public thought.

[Laelth]

16. Cenk Ungar made that argument a few years ago.

I buy it. This is not an inherently conservative country, not if you go by the policy positions most Americans support.

-Laelth

[Warpy]

22. We've been saying that for many years

Unfortunately, the corporate media find that sort of thing inconvenient and have eliminated our access.

[cali]

10. Can ytou explain how the methodology is flawed? Thanks.

[Arkansas Granny]

2. The term liberal has become so demonized over the last few years that many people

don't self identify as liberal even though they share many ideas. Also, conservatism has been linked to patriotism.

If you can get some "conservatives" into a serious discussion, they find, to their surprise, that they agree with liberals on many issues.

[deutsey]

7. And there's no one making a coherent, consistent case for liberalism

We have center-right, right, and far-right. That's basically the official spectrum of political discourse today.

It would be interesting to see how people would respond if they heard the center-left, left point of view clearly articulated as much as they hear gradations of the right 24/7.

[Scuba]

9. Bingo.

Thanks to DUer RC for this great graphic.

[cali]

11. here's hoping that Bill de Blasio is elected Mayor of NYC

It's almost a certainty. That will put liberalism in the spotlight.

[marmar]

13. Exactly. We have a center-right party, and a crazy party.

nt

[nolabels]

3. The person generating the topic, Mr. James Stimson is .......

the who the statistics teacher was warning you about. He is the kind of guy who would tell you that your ice cream melts because the mercury in your thermometer is on the rise. When most people know the reason your ice cream actually melts is because of higher temperatures outside the Freezer.

If you would read some of him you will notice he fails to note or notice the gridlock bound up in the federal government in particular. Seeing the tree in spite of the forest does not make you a visionary.

A may take four to ten years before the dam breaks but it will be something to reckon with when it does.

[JHB]

4. Is the culprit Stimson, or WaPo article author Bartels?

It's Bartels who made that chart using a methodology of " (Stimson tracks liberal policy mood, but I have reversed his index in order to highlight the striking current level of conservatism.) "

In doing so he effectively defines "conservative" here as "not liberal", and that doesn't necessarily hold.

I'd like to hear his explanation for why -- by his chart -- conservativism appears to have dropped immediately and precipitously the moment Reagan took office.

I don't know enough of what Stimson has to say to evaluate, but it is even less clear whether Bartels' modification produces a more -- or less -- accurate picture.

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. Bartlels is following conventional US political wisdom in contrasting 'liberal' and 'conservative'

And, FWIW, I don't think Bartels is right wing, if he produces a book like this:

In his 2008 book, Unequal Democracy: The political economy of the new gilded age", Bartels demonstrates that income inequality expanded under Republican presidential administrations and narrowed under Democratic presidential administrations since the early 1970s, when income inequality first started to expand. Under Republican presidents, rich families saw substantial net gains in their income, while poorer families saw negligible gains, producing a significant net increase in income inequality. By contrast, under Democratic presidents, poor families did slightly better than rich families proportionally, lessening income inequality. But, all income brackets---from the bottom twenty percent to the top five percent of the population---saw significantly greater increases in income under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents. In other words, had Democratic presidents been in office since the 1970s, income inequality may have lessened since the 1950s, not grown into what Bartels calls "The New Gilded Age" of the early 21st century. Bartels's findings led him to conclude that "economic inequality is, in substantial part, a political phenomenon."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Bartels

I don't think right-wingers have gone as far as claiming 'gilded age' as a badge of honour yet.

[JHB]

19. Yes, I caght myself knee-jerking and backed off somewhat in edit, but...

...the devil still lies in the details of exactly how those numbers are calculated.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

5. It looks like the American people

reflexively dislike whichever ideology is in power.

[FSogol]

6. Wishful thinking makes bad science.

[cali]

12. How do we know this is wishful thinking?

[FSogol]

20. Many trends run in cycles.

Take speeding tickets as an example:

Say there is a horrific accident, say a group of teenage girls on their way to help homeless children are killed by a speeding driver.
There is a public outcry about speeding and the police start to issue more speeding tickets.
This causes a drop in speeding accidents, but increases general dissatisfaction among the citizens since they are being charged for speeding. Then, there is a public outcry over the number of speeding citations and the police stop writing tickets. We are then at the point where this cycle begins, with there is a horrific accident....

Of course a attentive police department would realize that speeding was increasing before the accident and make steps to decrease it before the accident. Likewise, they would start backing off on writing tickets before the outcry when they saw the way the cycle was shifting. They get the info first.

While the country swings back and forth between conservatism and liberalism, the data (and media reports) are behind the cycle. A few vocal Conservative extremists with control of the dieing AM airwaves and some media outlets help form an impression that the country is moving right. Recent voter trends (Obama winning all the swing states, Texas and VA turning purple, millennials taking an interest, and actions of justice via social media) show the country is moving to the left, IMHO.

[KG]

14. seems they;re dumber than past decades

[Romulox]

17. This country has moved to the HARD right on economics. We then pretend that supporting

gay marriage is enough to make our laissez-faire economics "progressive". It doesn't.

DU is considerably more conservative than ANY democratic party I ever grew up with, for example.

[Laelth]

18. I agree that our political caste has moved to the right--hard.

And it has happened in the last 30 years, or so. That said, I think the American people remain center-left, as polls on policy positions regularly demonstrate.

-Laelth

[roamer65]

21. Everything has definitely shifted right over the last 30 years.

I really think it will take a near GD level economic event to shift the mindset significantly. It took that in 1929.